Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Ahoy SailfishOS on Exopc

Ahoy

I've been hacking on the Jolla Sailfish SDK which was launched recently to get it running outside of its virtual box environment.After installation you will find in the Sailfish SDK a sub-directory which contains the emulator virtualbox image (.vdi) which is used by the SDK to allow deployment of apps from QtCreator for testing. I used this as a basis for creating an image I can boot on the Exopc (and probably other Intel based tablets and netbooks).To convert the emulator vdi image I used vboxmanage tools to convert to a raw format which could be written to a usb key for booting in the Exo.Since the emulator was built for running in virtualbox with no hardware acceleration the image includes a version of mesa which is built to use llvmpipe software rendering. As we are running on Exo we have access to hardware acceleration so I built the latest versions of mesa and the xorg-intel-drv against mercore https://build.merproject.org/project/monitor?project=home%3Avgrade%3Abranches%3Anemo%3Adevel%3Ahw%3Ax86-common.After a few tweaks to remove configuration related to the virtual box environment (xorg.conf, /usr/lib/egl/, /var/lib/environment) I was booting sailfish os, see video for results.Plan is to integrate with the SDK to allow app deployment to the Exo and in time to extend this to ARM devices once Sailfish components become available for that platform.More details can be found at https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Sailfish/Exopcwhere contributions are welcome.